Pokémon Go as an HRG: Mobility, sociability, and surveillance in hybrid spaces

In July 2016, Niantic Labs released the hybrid/augmented reality game Pokemon Go. Due to the game’s sudden enormous success, many mobile phone users all over the world could experience for the first time playing a hybrid reality game. Hybrid reality games, however, are not new. For at least 15 years, researchers and artists experiment with the affordances of location-based mobile technology to create playful experiences that take place across physical and digital (i.e., hybrid) spaces. Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now?, developed in 2001, is one of the first examples. Yet for a long time, these games remained in the domain of art and research, and had therefore a very limited player community. Previous research has identified three design characteristics of hybrid reality games: mobility, sociability, and spatiality; and three main aspects to analyze these games: the connection between play and ordinary life, the relevance of the play community, and surveillance. With hybrid reality games’ commercializat...